Millwall transfer chief reveals struggles before club record signing of Mihailo Ivanovic

Millwall director of football Steve Gallen has outlined the persistence required to land Mihailo Ivanovic this summer – revealing that his old club Vojvodina did not want to initially sell the 19-year-old striker.

The Lions signed the Serbian frontman, who has been called up for his country’s next Nations League action in October, on transfer deadline day.

It was a club-record fee for the South Londoners in the region of £3million.

Gallen has done an extensive interview with Millwall TV and talked about the Ivanovic transfer in detail.

He said: “We have a reporting system. So we have about a dozen video scouts. We had a lot of people watching Mihailo’s games in Serbia over the last couple of years. They then send in reports. We then have our European scout who goes over to watch – he then sends in his reports.

“We then have the full-time staff who put in their reports as well. So on any one player we have an app we can look at and see there are about 15 reports on Mihailo. It pretty much says: ‘shall we sign, shall we not sign or shall we monitor?’ Pretty much 15 out of 15 of the reports said to sign this boy.

“Once I realised they were convinced on him then I went over to Serbia to watch him.

“But it wasn’t just to watch him play – I had to met the agent, his father and the sporting director of his club. There are weeks then of discussions to try and get a deal.

“They didn’t really want to sell him, Vojvodina, but they said pretty much if they did it was going to be for a lot more money than we were talking about. They were keen to sell him to Russia, he didn’t want to go to one of the clubs in Russia.

“It went on and on and one. We got there in the end.

“It’s something I pretty much started in May and our recruitment team had started maybe a year before – way before I got into the football club.

“We only got it done on the transfer window evening, right towards the end, but we had wanted him for weeks. It was making sure everybody was happy with the deal.

“I would have liked to have got Mihailo in a month earlier but his club, Vojvodina, were playing in the Europa Conference League. I went to watch them play against Maribor. Once they got knocked out of that, pretty much the club recognised they would make him available.

“Then there is only a week to 10 days until the close of the window. Their window doesn’t close on August 30 – they go on until September 14, so they weren’t in as much of a rush as we were.”